romantic home: What we bought, spent and ate this week

الجمعة، 12 أبريل 2019

What we bought, spent and ate this week

Hello Dear Reader,

On Wednesday of this week we had a visit from the gentleman who supplied our Native Bee Hive way back in 2017. He had contacted us a little while ago to make a time with us for him to come and split the hive. He obviously keeps a track of the hives and when approximately they would be ready to divide.

I had noticed in the past month or so lots of Native Bees hanging out on the Pomegranate tree, near their hive, they were there as there was no room left inside the hive. I guess if they were running late to get back to the hive there would be no room in the Inn!

So the Apiarist set about dividing the hive into two hives and also robbing the hive of the honey. For such a tiny hive it produced 2 large jars of liquid gold weighing 1.4 kg in total. I was simply amazed! Lovely Hubby did take a few videos of the event but had his fingers over the lens most of the time😛so I won't post it. I have linked a little video I found of Costa from Gardening Australia dividing his Native Bee hive here if you are interested. Also this video of one technique of how the honey is extracted.

Our Apiarist removed the honey simply by squeezing the beeswax over a sieve with a bowl underneath. The resulting honey is golden like normal honey but it is much thinner and has an almost botanic flavour, it is sweet, of course, but far different from honey produced by the european honey bee. We are in awe of these tiny Native Bees that they can produce so much honey.